Quantification of root nitrification capacity of bibb lettuce plants for use in a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS)

This research examined the feasibility of Bibb lettuce roots to provide a surface for nitrifying microbes to colonize, removing ammonia from wastewater. The work is geared towards sizing a rotational plant system to act as a natural biofilter to treat wastewater from the fish farming industry, making a recirculating natural system possible. It was observed that these natural, biotic surfaces provide a more suitable area for microbes to grow compared to inert materials. Nitrification rates were quantified, and were similar in magnitude to pre-experiment estimates. In addition, a correlation between Bibb lettuce leaf mass and root surface area was calculated, which greatly simplifies the calculation necessary to size a plant filtration unit

'Edgetic' perturbation of a C. elegans BCL2 ortholog.

Genes and gene products do not function in isolation but within highly interconnected 'interactome' networks, modeled as graphs of nodes and edges representing macromolecules and interactions between them, respectively. We propose to investigate genotype-phenotype associations by methodical use of alleles that lack single interactions, while retaining all others, in contrast to genetic approaches designed to eliminate gene products completely. We describe an integrated strategy based on the reverse yeast two-hybrid system to isolate and characterize such edge-specific, or 'edgetic', alleles. We established a proof of concept with CED-9, a Caenorhabditis elegans BCL2 ortholog. Using ced-9 edgetic alleles, we uncovered a new potential functional link between apoptosis and a centrosomal protein. This approach is amenable to higher throughput and is particularly applicable to interactome network analysis in organisms for which transgenesis is straightforward

MicroRNAs: Small RNAs with a big role in gene regulation

MicroRNAs are a family of small, non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression in a sequence-specific manner. The two founding members of the microRNA family were originally identified in Caenorhabditis elegans as genes that were required for the timed regulation of developmental events. Since then, hundreds of microRNAs have been identified in almost all metazoan genomes, including worms, flies, plants and mammals. MicroRNAs have diverse expression patterns and might regulate various developmental and physiological processes. Their discovery adds a new dimension to our understanding of complex gene regulatory networks